The Quest of the Simple Life eBook

the French style. I recalled the console tables
of old gilt, the brocaded couch, and the gilded chairs
which no one dared to sit upon; and I confess that
I preferred this habitable cottage-room. There
was something satisfying in its plainness; a sense
of something honest and intimately right; a suggestion
of solid worth and homely ease. My spirits had
already been restored by my decision; they were now
invigorated to the point of joy, for I saw the concrete
emblems, as it were, of the beauty which is found
in true simplicity.

The next day I returned to the spot accompanied by
my wife and my two boys. We made a new and elaborate
inspection of the two cottages. In the afternoon
the landlord, a neighbouring farmer, met us.
He was a dales-man born and bred, shrewd, much given
to silence, but with a plenitude of genial good sense.
He began by being somewhat suspicious of us after
the usual country fashion. When he at last understood
the sincerity and novelty of our intentions, he treated
us with a kind of fatherly derision, which had no
hint of impoliteness or impertinence in it.
‘It will na do, I’m thinking,’ he
said, several times. When he saw us persistent,
and that our persistence grew in the ratio of his
dissuasion, he said, just as though he were talking
to wayward children, ’Well, a wilful man maun
have his way. As for my bit of cottages, ye’re
welcome to them, an’ I’ll ask no rent till
ye’ve been in them long enough to know your
own minds better. They’re of no worth
to me, an’ I’ll be your debtor for living
in them. If ye want to pull them aboot, ye’ll
do it at your own expense, I’m willing.
Later on, if ye care to stay, you and me’ll
fix a rent, an’ I gie ye ma word it shall na
be more than ten pund a year. I’ll help
ye too if ye’ll let me. I can find ye
a man as ’ll do all the little jobs you want
done, an’ glad to do it. As for fishing,
the stream’s yours, an’ I would na say
but what ye might get some shooting too. But
ye’ll tire of it, ye’ll tire of it,’
he concluded, with a grave smile.

With that he handed us the keys. He then shook
our hands with the melancholy air of a man who says
farewell to friends embarked upon a perilous adventure,
and strode away across the heather, stopping once
to wave his hand to us as if in wise dissuasion.

So Mahomet might have stood above Damascus when he
said, ’My Paradise is not there,’ and
yet Damascus was a Paradise all the same.

CHAPTER VIII

BUYING HAPPINESS

We are all children, and in nothing so much perhaps
as in the kind of delight we take in any form of building.
The architectural efforts of a child with a box of
bricks or a heap of sand explain the Tower of Babel,
the Pyramids, and the Golden House of Nero. House-building
unites the ideal with the real more thoroughly than
any other human employment. What can there be
more delightful than to see that which you have dreamed
grow into tangible and enduring form? No wonder
the rich man builds himself ‘a lordly pleasure-house’;
it is a kind of practical poetry which he can understand.
Were there only millionaires enough to go round all
architects would be wealthy, for building is a kind
of material art admirably suited to men of material
intelligence.